The Intuitionist: A Novel

Lila Mae's good ol' boy colleagues in the Department of Elevator Inspectors are understandably jealous of the flawless record that her natural intelligence and diligence have earned, and understandably delighted when Number Eleven in the newly completed Fanny Briggs Memorial Building goes into deadly free fall just hours after Lila Mae has signed off on it, using the controversial "Intuitionist" method of ascertaining elevator safety. It is, after all, an election year in the Elevator Guild, and the Empiricists would do most anything to discredit the Intuitionist faction. Everyone on both sides assumes that Number Eleven was sabotaged and Lila Mae set up to take the fall. "So complete is Number Eleven's ruin," writes Whitehead, "that there's nothing left but the sound of the crash, rising in the shaft, a fall in opposite: a soul." Lila Mae's doom seems equally irreversible.

Whitehead evokes a world so utterly involving to its own denizens that outside reality does not impinge on its perfect solipsism. We the readers are taken hostage as Lila Mae strives to exonerate herself in this urgent adventure full of government spies, underworld hit men, and seductive double agents. Behind the action, always, is the Idea. Lila Mae's quest reveals the existence of heretofore lost writings by James Fulton, father of Intuitionism, a giant of vertical thought, whose fate is mysteriously entwined with her own. If she is able to find and reveal his plan for the Black Box, the perfect, next-generation elevator, the city as it now exists will instantly be obsolescent. The social and economic implications are huge and the denouement is elegantly philosophical. Most impressive of all is the integrity of Whitehead's prose. Eschewing mere cleverness, resisting showoff word play, he somehow manages to strike a tone that's always funny, always fierce, and always entirely respectful of his characters and their world. May the god of second novels smile as broadly on him as did the god of firsts. --Joyce Thompson

Product Description
Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist wowed critics and readers everywhere and marked the debut of an important American writer. This marvellously inventive, genre-bending, noir-inflected novel, set in the curious world of elevator inspection, portrays a universe parallel to our own, where matters of morality, politics, and race reveal unexpected ironies.

And what a world it is. Set in an unnamed metropolis, characterized by "magnificent elevated trains, five daily newspapers, [and] two baseball stadiums" that leaves some of its residents "too afraid to leave the house", Whitehead has created a hermetically sealed society. He never flinches in his portrayal, offering up detail after detail of his little world that are at once believable and credible. The centrepiece of this society, the raison d'etre, is that it takes elevator culture very seriously. A weekly magazine, dedicated to said culture, is called "Lift". Visionaries, such as Elisha Graves Otis and the recently deceased James Fulton, are revered much in the same that Plato or Aristotle are in our world. And the Department of Elevator Inspectors serves as a neat little microcosm of the whole, not to mention a terribly desirable place of employment. This is where the title character, Lila Mae Watson, works. That is until the Number 11 cab at the Fanny Briggs building went into a free fall a day after her inspection ("Verticality is such a risky enterprise"). This is the cataclysmic event off of which the story unfolds.

Lila Mae is a strange creation. She is cynical, headstrong, and fiercely intelligent (Case in point: she "does not expect human beings to conduct themselves in any other way but how they truly are. Which is weak"). She's had a perfect record as an Intuitionist inspector in a world dominated by Empiricists. But she's also learned to live in a racist world where she is the only female elevator inspector. Watch her bite her tongue when a pushy salesman espouses the virtues of skin-lighteners and hair-straighteners. Or see her reaction when, at a yearly banquet thrown by the Department, she's confronted by the antics of Hambone and Mr. Grizzard, a minstrel show eaten up by her white colleagues. Lila Mae must keep her head, for in her search for the truth about the accident she is confronted by a series of shady characters, none of whom she can really trust. Or can she?

It is this part of the book, within the detective story narrative, where Whitehead really shines. He mixes into his dystopia nightmare a healthy amount of neo-film noir elements. People are always sizing each other up, doing things to gauge reactions. A security guard asks to see Lila Mae's badge, but he never really looks at it. "He just asked for effect," comments Whitehead's spare narrator. Later, a scene is set inside a hotel room, where "the red neon of the liquor store sign across the street flashes... off and on." You almost expect Humphrey Bogart to emerge from such scenes. Which makes for a fine contrast when you once again realize that you're reading Lila Mae's story. There is nothing Bogart about her.

Up until the final act, I wasn't sure if I bought into all of Whitehead's ideas. However, in that final act, he brings things together so smoothly and so efficiently, I couldn't help but see the light that he was shining right into my face. His elevator analogy congeals nicely. It ably pulls back society's veil to reveal that, as the fictional Mr. Fulton once wrote, "There is another world beyond this one." Pay attention throughout, be patient at the beginning, and trust that what Whitehead has for you at the end will make the whole enterprise worthwhile. Follow this recipe, and you'll be impressed by "The Intuitionist" as much as I was.


A serious test of book group commitment.   April 26, 2000
14 out of 26 found this review helpful

My book group chose this book. Were I not committed to this group of people I would have never made it past page 10. I could never figure out what the book was trying to be. A thriller? No, the exhaustive level of description quickly put to death any hint of tension. A character study? No, the characters and conflict are all over the top caricatures. A story about elevators? No, as an engineer I can say with confidence that all pseudo-technical passages were gibberish. I could not help but be impressed (or maybe intimidated) with the frequency of impressively difficult words. But even this was a distraction. It was as though the book were a writing exercise where each chapter had to use five obscure words from a vocabulary builder list. I kept up hope that Colin was using elevators/intuitionist/empricist as a metaphor that would soon be revealed and I would bow in awe to his creative genius. Instead I was just glad it was over. Now the hard part will be to think up something nice to say before the next book group meeting.


Up and Out   February 28, 2005
benshlomo (Los Angeles, CA USA)
14 out of 18 found this review helpful

The story is told of an unemployed actor who finally gets a role as the gravedigger in a production of "Hamlet". Asked to describe the play, he says, "It's about a gravedigger who meets a prince."

Parts of "The Intuitionist" might strike you as being similarly self-absorbed, except that the whole world of the novel takes that attitude, not just one person. While it may be normal to write a novel about an elevator inspector in an environment where people have other jobs and interests, it is quite unusual to write a novel about an elevator inspector who meets no one but other elevator professionals. This is an obsessed protagonist in an obsessed world.

Her name is Lila Mae Watson, the first black woman to earn an elevator inspector's badge, and the daughter of an elevator operator in a department store. She graduated from the elevator inspector's academy, evidently an enormous compound of impressive buildings. Her love interest works as a waiter for a professional association of inspectors. All of this association's members are, like Lila Mae, intuitionists; when inspecting an elevator, they intuit any problems in a sort of meditative trance rather than by examining the elevator's workings, as the Empiricists do. And Lila Mae's love interest has a connection to Intuitionism's philosophical founder, as well. She meets one reporter in her travels - he works for "Lift" Magazine, available at every newsstand. She meets a number of underworld figures - they obtain most of their money from corruption among elevator maintenance men.

The story opens with Lila Mae Watson learning that a brand-new elevator, inspected and passed by her, has crashed just when the Mayor was dedicating the building. She believes that this is a coincidence even less than you do, and goes about to discover what actually happened. She's in trouble, even perhaps to the extent of a threat to her life, and she realizes this. Nevertheless, she neither panics nor complains, but remains cool and effective throughout. In other words, she behaves in a manner that leaves the Empiricists no chance to get at her, which drives them and the Intuitionists right up the wall.

Are you starting to get the idea? The inhabitants of the city described here are surrounded by elevators the way you and I are surrounded by sex - and yes, there is a certain amount of eroticism involved in the relationship. (I'll leave the dirty jokes to your imagination.) Mostly, though, this is a noir murder mystery, complete with crime, cover-up, hardboiled investigator, implications that go all the way to the highest levels of government, and shameful secrets from the past. The only difference is that this time the victim is - you guessed it - an elevator.

Maybe the most remarkable thing about "The Intuitionist" is that Colson Whitehead invented this lift-happy world, and endowed it with a plausible story, without getting satirical or cute. You know the kind of thing I'm talking about, where the author turns every other word into a pun based on the central idea so everyone will know how clever he is? Or decides that because the book is an allegory it doesn't have to have an actual story to it? Not here. This is a genuine, effective thriller with some rather inspired fantasy elements thrown in.

All of this works just right from start to finish. One element that works less well is the novel's theme of racism. On the one hand, Lila Mae Watson's color - the necessity of contending with bigotry and condescension - adds to her growing isolation as the story progresses. On the other hand, it yanks the story out of Whitehead's carefully-constructed fantasy world and into real history. The racism that Lila Mae must face in "The Intuitionist" is blatant, overt and straight out of the Jim Crow age. It is therefore anachronistic; today's real-world racism is a much subtler and slimier animal. I, for one, found the whole subtext distracting; I can't possibly object to an author's decision to deal with real social evils in a fantasy, but I do object if an author decides to deal with former social evils in a fantasy. If the Harry Potter books tried to deal with the nineteenth-century issue of child labor rather than the twenty-first-century issue of child abuse, I would ask the same question: "What's the point?"

Well, "The Intuitionist" is a first novel, and evidently Colson Whitehead wanted to deal with racism, so he shoehorned it into his book when it doesn't really belong there. It's not fatal, but it is a pity, because actually the issue of racial differences does add something to his plot. Without giving too much away, it turns out that racial tension and elevator theory do share one characteristic; the desire to escape.

And here we come to the thing that elevates "The Intuitionist" above simple entertainment and makes it a genuine achievement. If it were just a murder mystery with an elevator as the victim, the book would be a curiosity, nothing more. Turns out, though, because of that theme of the desire to escape, that this is really a study of the struggle between living by rules and living by improvisation. Lila Mae Watson's entire character, as it exists at the story's beginning, hews so very closely to a rule system that she's barely human. Through her encounters with people and things that long for escape, for the opportunity to invent their own existences, Lila Mae comes awake. At the end of the book, she has no strict guidance anymore, but she is content.

That's why "The Intuitionist" is a good use of your reading time. It goes down smoothly, but like most good pulp literature it can make an important difference in your life without being too obvious about it. Now, if I said that this sounds like an average ride in an elevator, would you say I was getting obsessed?

Benshlomo says, Life is a balance between obedience and invention